Conversation: Amy Waldman, Author of ‘The Submission’

What if a jury selected a design for the new 9/11 memorial and then discovered that its architect was a Muslim? Ten years after the terrorist attack, the actual memorial is just about to open. But an alternative history is imagined in the new novel, “The Submission.”

This first novel by former New York Times reporter Amy Waldman explores in fictional form many of the tensions that in recent years have become the stuff of daily headlines.

I spoke to Waldman about her novel last week:

49792Conversation: Amy Waldman, Author of 'The Submission'For more on this story go to www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/ What if a jury selected a design for the new 9/11 memorial and then discovered that its architect was a Muslim? The new novel, 'The Submission' that explores in fictional form many of the tensions that in recent years have become the stuff of daily headlines. Its author is a longtime journalist for the New York Times, Amy Waldman.2011-09-06 09:07:00disabled2120341982o8qihcny4wc

Editor’s note: All this week, the NewsHour will look back on 10 years after 9/11. We’ll have coverage online and every evening on the show leading up to a special program, “America Remembers 9/11,” which will air on Sunday evening (check your local listings for times).

JEFFREYBROWN: What if a jury selected a design for the new 9/11 memorial and then discovered that its architect was a Muslim? Ten years after the terror attack, the actual memorial is just about to open. But an alternative history is imagined in the new novel, “The Submission,” which explores in fictional form many of the tensions that in recent years have become the stuff of daily headlines. Its author is in fact a longtime journalist, a former reporter for the New York Times, Amy Waldman, and this is her first novel. Welcome to you.

AMYWALDMAN: Thank you.

JEFFREYBROWN: You were in New York during 9/11. You wrote about it as a journalist afterwards. How and why did you decide that there was a good fictional story to tell?

AMYWALDMAN: I didn’t think about it for a few years and then was having a conversation with a friend that led us to talking actually about Maya Lin and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the controversy, which everyone remembers around that. One small piece of that controversy was her being Asian-American. And it got me thinking, what would the rough equivalent be for 9/11? And out of that came the seed for this. It had to be fiction, because it hasn’t happened and it was a fictional scenario, but I was drawn to doing it fictionally just because I felt like it was a great way into a lot of these questions and the multiple perspectives around them that we’ve all wrestled with since 9/11.

JEFFREYBROWN: So in your case, a process to pick an architect, all goes well until it turns out his name his Mohammad Khan, but he’s a Muslim-American, he grew up in fact near where we are sitting here in suburban Washington, D.C., fictionally, University of Virginia, just in many ways your average, ambition young architect who’s trying to get ahead.

AMYWALDMAN: Barely thinks of himself as Muslim. It’s not an essential part of his identity at all, but when this attack happens, it’s thrust to the center of his identity and of course after he wins the competition that’s even more true.

JEFFREYBROWN: And once you open up this story, the layers of, particularly New York but nationally, as well, open up, right? You’ve got politics, you’ve got the media, you’ve got class. What was that like to try to explore that large a picture?

AMYWALDMAN: It was challenging, but I felt like, that’s this decade that we’ve lived through, all of those elements are very present in the debates around Islam, the War on Terror, how we react to 9/11, all if it, even looking at the family members from 9/11.They are such a diverse group, and we talk about them as a monolith, but in terms of class, politics, everything, they are so diverse, and so I wanted to capture that.

JEFFREYBROWN: And did you explore it as a journalist in some sense? You had done interviews in the past about this, but did you interview actual people on which to base some of these characters?

AMYWALDMAN: I didn’t because I just didn’t want to ask them to give me their experiences for a novel. I felt, if I’m going to do this, I have to imagine it. And I also felt like I needed to be free to write the novel I wanted to write, and the journalist in me would come out too much if I went and interviewed someone and where I wouldn’t feel free to say, ok, I want that part of your experience but not that. I would be too faithful to the facts, so I didn’t do any of that.

JEFFREYBROWN: I think you were still writing when the whole Ground Zero mosque happened?

AMYWALDMAN: I was.

JEFFREYBROWN: And what was your thought there? Was it uh-oh? Or was it, I’m on to something?

AMYWALDMAN: I definitely thought, I’m on to something. I had finished a full draft of the novel before that. It definitely made me rethink small pieces of the novel just because I didn’t want it to read exactly like the newspapers. It was amazing how much so much of what people were saying was aping what I had already written, but in some ways it just it did confirm for me that I was on the right track and that there was something powerful that needed exploring through fiction.

JEFFREYBROWN: When you say something powerful that needed exploring, what exactly is that? Because there are so many elements to this, right? What was it for you that needed exploring?

AMYWALDMAN: The novel has a lot of different themes, but one is in the wake of 9/11, who do we trust? How do we decide who to trust? American Muslims, how do we think about them? How do we understand Islam when there is so much fear and confusion around it? And I think the ambivalence even many liberals have felt since 9/11 about how to feel about these things. I was interested in all of those things.

JEFFREYBROWN: You mean wanting to be open but still very much afraid.

AMYWALDMAN: Exactly, exactly. And I think the conflict almost between principle and emotion I think is a powerful theme in the novel and was very interesting to me.

JEFFREYBROWN: Now we are not going to walk through the whole story and I’m not going to give anything away, but it resolves itself after many twists and turns here and episodes. But was it important beyond the storytelling, of course, it has to resolve itself, but given these themes that you wanted to explore, was it somehow important for you to find a way to resolve this story and the dilemmas involved?

AMYWALDMAN: It was. It was tricky to figure out how to end it, because I think even now we’re in sort of a precarious moment where we don’t know exactly where the country is going and what direction. I wanted to be true to that and yet also achieve some resolutions. I hope I pulled that off in the ending, but I don’t want to spoil that —

JEFFREYBROWN: Well, I’m curious because this is your first novel. Did you have models? I mean, I know a lot of people looked at Tom Wolfe and “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” that kind of big social novel. And that’s essentially what you’ve got here because you really look, as I said, at many of the institutions of the city at street level. Were you aware of those kinds of models in starting out?

AMYWALDMAN: I was and I wasn’t. I think “Bonfire of the Vanities” is kind of an archetype of a social novel, but I read it I think when it came out in maybe ’87, so it wasn’t a conscious model that I wanted to try to replicate it. And there are writers since, you know, Richard Price, Jonathan Franzen, writers who sort of are working both very deeply with character, but the intersection of that with politics and social issues and all of that, and I think those are some of my models, is just how do you get both very intimate portraits of people but also how are they changed and are their personalities and histories changing these very public grand events.

JEFFREYBROWN: And, of course, here we are at the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Is it your sense now both working as a journalist and now as a novelist that we are only at the beginning of writing about 9/11? Or is it something that writers will explore for a long time do you think?

AMYWALDMAN: I think it’s something writers will explore for a long time, partly everybody will come at it exploring a different piece of it, and also I think how we look at it changes through time and the writing will reflect that. There were books and novels that came out very early on responding almost on a primal level to what had happened, and then I think mine and then others will come later, you know, maybe taking a longer view, sort of stepping back a little bit and looking at what’s happened to the country in the intervening years.

JEFFREYBROWN: What about for you? You enjoy this experience enough to work on a next novel?

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